Just another WordPress.com weblog

Healthcare IT and Hospital Readiness

A recent survey sponsored by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) and Dell has found that the data centers of small and medium-sized hospitals in North America, Europe, and China are not prepared for the “wave of data” that will soon be inundating them.

The verdict on hospitals’ readiness to handle this additional demand – including the capability of data centers to store and process the workloads necessitated by the ever-increasing resolution of EMR images – is mixed as countries spend billions to implement healthcare IT.

Among the issues reported by IT executives:

In the US, regulatory issues and compliance requirements were cited as significant hurdles. Server proliferation – small and medium providers averaged 75 servers per hospital – and application complexity made for further complication.

In the UK, financial and budget issues were a major source of concern, as was the scaling and management of storage.

In China, lack of capacity (an average of just four servers per hospital), lack of standards, and aging servers were worrisome to IT executives.

In Canada, staffing challenges and data security were frequently mentioned.

In France, rapid data growth (expected to increase by 50 percent over the next two years, twice as fast as other countries) was problematic.

In Germany, little use of virtualization suggested an incomplete utilization of newer technologies.